How do I schedule in 8 hour days but use resources in 6 hour days

[hal]

We have programmers who are constantly interrupted during the day and
we figure they get 6 hours on a project during an 8 hour day.

Is there an easy way to put in the tasks for a project using an 8 hour
day, but then somehow adjust to reflect the fact that our resource only
gets 6 hours applied per 8 hour day. I've tried serveral schemes
(project calender, resource calender and resource %) and the ending
date for the project never changes (the project should take longer @ 6
hrs per day).

Or, maybe I approaching this the wrong way? Thanks for any help.

 

[John]

We have programmers who are constantly interrupted during the day and
we figure they get 6 hours on a project during an 8 hour day.

Is there an easy way to put in the tasks for a project using an 8 hour
day, but then somehow adjust to reflect the fact that our resource only
gets 6 hours applied per 8 hour day. I've tried serveral schemes
(project calender, resource calender and resource %) and the ending
date for the project never changes (the project should take longer @ 6
hrs per day).

Or, maybe I approaching this the wrong way? Thanks for any help.

hal,
Personally, I think you are taking the wrong approach. Virtually any
labor resource works at something less than 100% efficiency. Everybody
gets interrupted either directly or indirectly (e.g. a co-worker stops
by to ask a work related question, the employee gets a call from school
saying Johnny fell on the playground, etc.). That's just life. Trying to
schedule for that inefficiency is hit and miss at best. OK, so what
would I do? I would develop a new schedule based on historical data from
previous similar efforts. That data is probably the best source of
information you will find and it inherently includes the normal
inefficiency of the labor resources. Call it good and go from there.

OK, that's my opinion. If you still want to try your method, here is
what should work. Leave the task type at Fixed Units, effort driven,
which is the default. Leave the estimated duration at the default 1 day.
Set up your programmer resources to have a work day of 6 hours (from the
Resource Sheet go to Tools/Change Working time and select all working
days and then set the From and To hours to equal a total of 6 hours). As
resources are applied to tasks you will see the Start and Finish dates
expand to account for the resources shorter work day. Please note
however that the Duration field is governed by the Hours per day setting
under Tools/Options/Calendar tab so the duration will still be shown in
8 hour equivalent days.

Hope this helps.
John

 

[Steve House]

There's a couple of subtle issues for you to deal with here, one of the most
important is being clear on just what you're meaning when you estimate task
durations. When you're sitting at your computer thinking about the
project's parameters and you say to yourself "I think Task X should take us
about 6 days" what are you really saying? Do you mean based on past work
experience it should take typical Joe Resource 6 days to do the task from
start to finish working as he normally does or do you mean it would take 6
days FTE IF the assigned resource worked on it without distraction? If
typical Joe Resource has an average of 2 hours per day consumed by overhead,
a day means 6 hours worth of actual progress and your first estimate means
the task is worth 36 man-hours. If. OTOH, you're trying to say it would
require 6 days FTE if we could mae hte overhead go away, then the task is
worth 48 man-hours, quite a difference. The problem that seems to come up
over and over again is that people try to estimate with the second method
when in fact all the observational history they have of data on which to
base their estimates of the task is the former. I really don't know how
many man-hours are theoretically required to polish 100 fids and I'm not
really sure I ought to care. What I do know is that last year Joe had to
polish 25 similar fids and he started it on Monday and finished it on
Thursday. It took him 4 days (included time "wasted" on overhead) to do 25
last year so it will probably take him 16 days working as he usually does to
do 100 this year. That's the equivalent of a 75% allocation. If it's
really important to track the actual man-hours spent in the task you could
estimate the duration at 16 day and assign him at 75% but IMHO most of the
time just ignoring to overhead and considering it at 16 days 100% assignment
is close enough.